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Upholding local knowledge and a partnership approach to building resilience

Shenggen Fan, Director General of IFPRI

Listening to keynote speakers; Shenggen Fan,
Director General of IFPRI, Kanayo F. Nwanze, the IFAD President, Ertharin
Cousin, Executive Director of WFP and Prime Minister of Ethiopia Hailemariam
Desalegn, during the inauguration of the IFPRI 2020 Conference on resilience was an inspiring reminder that the rural poor are our clients, who
we must work with in close partnership – they understand the local context best
and must drive approaches for building resilience. Success can be
achieved through a partnership approach with smallholders at the forefront, including women, and be driven
by strong national leadership.

The IFAD President Kanayo F
Nwanze drew focus on developing the resilience of the rural poor. “Investing in
the resilience of smallholder farmers is investing the resilience of food
systems, the resilience of communities and the strength of nations,” he said.Outlining examples from countries that have
based their economies on small holder farming such as Japan, Korea, Norway,
Thailand and Vietnam, the IFAD President emphasized the need to link resilience
to agriculture & nutrition. Agriculture
and rural development are essential for building resilient food and nutrition
security, and he gave some hard-core facts - that there are 500 million
smallholder family farms that provide for 80% of global food produce, making
smallholder farmers’ key contributors to growing economies. Growth in small
holder farming can drive balanced and sustainable development by transforming
rural areas; particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where growth in the
agriculture sector is 11 times more effective in reducing poverty than growth
generated by any other sector.

Challenging past
development approaches “conceived by experts miles away” the IFAD Presidentemphasized that it is important that we build
partnership-based approaches that elevate local knowledge to facilitate
smallholder farmers to turn farming into a business by engaging in global value
chains and markets for their benefit. “Development is not something that we do for
people, Development is what people do for themselves” was a statement that
evoked much debate after the speech. Ertharin Cousin and the President of IFAD
also brought the need for Gender equity in all stages of programming to the
table. In the words of Ertharin Cousin, women are the “world’s frontline
agriculture and nutrition workers,” we cannot succeed without their ownership
and engagement in resilience approaches.

All three keynote speakers
commended Ethiopia for its strong national leadership that has successfully
committed to build a resilient agricultural system by dedicating 15% of the GDP
to agriculture to obtain their collective vision to become a middle-income
economy that is green and climate resilient. Ethiopia was able to survive the
2011, Horn of Africa crisis, which was the worst drought in 60 years. This was
because of its commitment to raising the productivity of smallholder farmers,
strengthening agricultural marketing systems and bringing more land under
irrigation, ensuring to reduce land degradation and adopt soil and water
conservation measures. Ethiopia was able to mitigate the impact of the drought
on the rural poor through Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme. Ethiopia
is amongst various countries that have made a serious commitment to build food
and nutrition resilience and building on research based policies and these
ongoing successes, Shenggen Fan, Director General of IFPRI, stressed that it is
possible to end hunger by 2025, and the resilience approach “can help us tackle
issues that run across the entire agriculture, food, nutrition and
environmental system.”

On the side lines of the
conference, the IFAD President also met with research centres that are a part
of the Consortium Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIARs) to
discuss ongoing partnership to increase food productivity in developing
countries through the application of research-based technologies. The CGIAR
centres expressed their growing relation with international organization such
as IFAD, to ensure that research based policies and solutions/programmes to
develop sustainable agricultural systems that are climate sensitive and develop
food and nutrition security, are up scaled and implemented to create impacts to
improve the livelihoods of the rural poor.

Kanayo F Nwanze, the
IFAD President, with high level representatives from research centres forming
the Consortium Group on International Agricultural Research at the ILRI campus
in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia